NVIDIA’s Ampere launch will be primarily remembered for the limited inventory available at launch. The monthly supply figures for most retailers have failed to reach even the four-figure mark for each member of the RTX 30 series family.
China’s largest hardware retailer, JD.com seems to be dealing with similar problems, but instead of putting out an honest statement, the store has been releasing fake sales numbers and even publishing bogus reviews to make the situation appear less dire than it actually is.
This was originally reported by a Baidu user who reports that despite indicating a total RTX 3080 sales figure of around 114K, JD has fulfilled less than 1,000 orders (743 to be precise). That’s less than 1% of the official figure reported by the eRetailer. Like most stores, reviews can only be posted by verified buyers which means that JD is aware of the acute shortage of the RTX 30 series cards and is deliberately posting fake reviews.
Colorful sold the highest number of RTX 3080’s with a sales figure of 250 units, with the retailer replacing this with a much higher number (700). The rest of the board partners show sales numbers of several thousand, but none of them actually managed to deliver slightly more than a hundred units. Zotac, a popular vendor in the APAC region sold just 10 cards but deliberately falsifies that figure to 35K!
It’s been nearly a month since the RTX 3080 launched or was supposed to launch and we’re yet to see a stable supply of cards. It’s unclear whether the reason behind the shortages is Samsung’s yield issues or limited GD6X supply or perhaps both.
Regardless, as AMD preps to launch its RX 6000 (and Big Navi) graphics cards in the coming days, it’ll be interesting to see how NVIDIA deals with this unique situation. Although the RTX 3070 is slated to launch a day after the Big Navi announcement, sources indicate that supply will be quite dismal, and very few users will be able to grab any actual hardware. This is a prime opportunity for AMD to claw its way back to the top of the GPU market.
